This invention relates to telecommunications networks, and more particularly to telecommunications networks employing dynamic Internet Protocol (IP) addressing for packet-data services.
The recent increase in wireless data communications and modem dial-up for accessing information through the Internet has created demands for faster response times and more network availability. Internet Protocol (IP) provides standards for assigning addresses to different network nodes and is employed in routing messages through the data network. IP addresses are primarily assigned according to network topology typically associated with geographic locations of the communication devices which request access to the Internet.
There are two forms of IP address assignment, dynamic IP assignment and static IP assignment. In static IP addressing, the IP address assigned to a telecommunication service subscriber (such as an Internet service subscriber) is always fixed even if the subscriber is using his or her communication device outside of the assigned geographic area. Accordingly, static IP addressing only allows users to have an IP address that is associated with the assigned geographic location of the Internet access communication device. If the user requests data information from an area outside of the assigned geographic location, the requested communication must first be sent to the assigned geographic location and then forwarded to its final destination. Disadvantageously, static IP addressing has been known to create long response times and possibly reduced throughput.
Attempts have been made to solve some of these problems with dynamic IP addressing. Dynamic IP addressing assigns a new temporary IP address local to the requesting device according to its current location. Therefore, Internet access requests outside of the originally assigned network do not have to be routed back through the originally assigned network. Instead, communications may be processed directly at the geographic location of the new temporary local address. Unfortunately, in dynamic IP the local addresses which may be used are limited to only those which are available in the geographic coverage area where the requesting device is positioned. Thus, under certain circumstances there are still long response times and more often, perhaps, requests for access to Internet services are entirely refused. This is because dynamic IP addressing works only if an unassigned local address is available, the user must wait until one becomes available in the region or retry at a later time. As a result, at times users may be unable to access certain networks that are generally accessible when the requesting device is positioned at a non-remote location. Therefore, there is a need to create faster response times and limit Internet service refusals to subscribers by improving the dynamic IP addressing.